Brief biographies of the Authors

Writer : -
Year : 2014


Noriko Aikawa-Faure, former Director of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit of UNESCO, has worked on this programme from its creation in 1992. She thus followed the whole process of the genesis and development of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. After her retirement from UNESCO in December 2002, she continued to serve UNESCO as an Adviser to the Assistant Director-General for Culture until 2009, and also worked as Professor of Cultural Studies at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan until March 2007. Currently she is the Advisor for ICH at the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.

Muhammad alZekri Ph.D. is the Head of Communication and Intangible Heritage at Think Heritage! in Bahrain. He was also visiting lecturer at the Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany, and the University of Westminster, UK. His main research interest is in heritage communication in museums and at heritage sites, as well as the dynamics of communicative public spaces, networks of knowledge in public spheres and research methodology in the field of heritage and communication studies. His forthcoming book is entitled Exploring the female sphere of heritage communication: Dream-Lore in Dubai.

Patrick Boylan (B.Sc. Hull and Ph.D. Leicester) was Professor of Arts Policy and Management at City University, London from 1990 to 2004, and on retirement became Professor Emeritus of Heritage Policy and Management. From 1964 to 1990 he held senior positions in English museums and arts organisations, including 18 years as Director of Museums and Arts in Leicestershire. He was the Centenary President of the UK’s Museums Association in 1998-90, and 3 decades of office with ICOM has included periods as Vice President, President of the ICOM Training Committee, Chairman of ICOM UK and Chairperson of ICOM’s Legal Affairs and Properties Committee. His extensive research and publications have ranged over geology, history of science, museums, heritage, music, cultural policy and management. He was the first Editor-in-Chief of the IJIH.

El-Sayed el-Aswad (Ph. D, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is currently Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the United Arab Emirates University. He has previously taught at Wayne State University, Tanta University, and Bahrain University. He has published widely in both Arabic and English. Research interests include intangible and tangible heritage, folk cosmology, e-folklore, e-communication, heritage of Arab Americans, Arab Gulf societies, symbolic anthropology, folklore, and Middle East cultures.

Hilary Vanessa Finchum-Sung (Ph.D. Indiana University) is Associate Professor of Theory and Ethnomusicology in the Department of Korean Music at Seoul National University and also serves as its Chair of the Interdisciplinary Major in Music Education. She has published in academic journals such as Ethnomusicology, The World of Music (new series), and Seoul Journal of Korean Studies. Her research interests include Korean traditional music (gugak) education, musical articulations of multiculturalism, performance visuality, contemporary gugak performance practice, and musical tourism. She is currently engaged in a field research project on transmission and cultural promotion in Jindo, and is completing a manuscript on 21st century gugak transitions. In avid pursuit of bi-musicality, she regularly practises and performs on the two-string spike fiddle, haegeum.

Amareswar Galla, PhD. is an alumnus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is currently Professor and Executive Director of the International Institute for the Inclusive Museum, and a champion of cultural democracy, inclusive and deep ecology demonstration projects, Intangible Heritage, World Heritage, indigenous cultural rights, intercultural dialogue and the UN Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. He was the producer and editor of the flagship publication to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the UNESCO 1972 World Heritage Convention: World Heritage: Benefits Beyond Borders. He was also the co-founder and 2nd and 3rd Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Intangible Heritage and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on the Inclusive Museum.

Peou Hang Ph.D. is Deputy Director General of APSARA, in charge of the Water Management Department. He was awarded his doctorate in 2002 from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium. He joined APSARA in 2004. He has conducted research on the natural resources and the environment of the Angkor World Heritage Site, and is responsible for the management of the extensive hydraulic system network within the Angkor Park. Over the last ten years he has applied his research to rehabilitate many of the ancient hydraulic systems to ensure the stability of the temples and the sustainable development of the Siem Reap region.

Marc Jacobs holds the new UNESCO Chair of Critical Heritage Studies and Safeguarding the ICH (2014-2018) at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels in Belgium. Since 2007 he has been the director of FARO (Flemish Interface for Cultural Heritage, www.faronet.be). He is currently a member of the Flemish/ Belgian UNESCO Commission. He participated in all the meetings of experts in Paris for drafting the 2003 UNESCO Convention and was in the Belgian Delegation to the Intergovernmental Committee of that convention between 2006 and 2008, and currently from 2012 to 2016. He was trained as an historian and ethnologist at the University of Ghent, obtained a Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels in 1998, and worked as a researcher at the European University Institute, the University of Antwerp and Brussels. His main research interests are critical heritage studies, cultural policy, social and cultural history and food history.

Sabine Marschall is Associate Professor in Cultural and Heritage Tourism at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. She received her academic training in art and architectural history in Germany and obtained a Ph.D. from the Eberhardt-Karls-Universität, Tübingen in 1993. During the 1990s her research focused on art and architectural history in South Africa; her major publications include the monograph on Community Mural Art in South Africa (UNISA Press, 2002). For the past 12 years she has been researching issues of commemoration, memorialisation, cultural heritage and heritage tourism. Her most recent book, Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South Africa was published by Brill in 2010. Her current research focuses on issues of collective memory, intangible heritage and tourism with particular reference to the Inanda Heritage Route.

Soon Cheol Park is Professor in the Division of Computer Engineering at Chonbuk National University, Korea. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University, USA in 1991. His research focuses on information retrieval, data mining, digital archives and knowledge discovery. Since 2003 he has been involved in collaborative research on people’s life histories and established the Digital Archives of People’s Oral Histories. Currently he is also actively researching various issues of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), including system building and management of ICH in Korea and some Asian countries.

Britta Rudolff Ph.D. holds the Chair for Cultural Heritage Management at the Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany, where she teaches various courses related to heritage management. She is also the Managing Director of her University’s Institute for Heritage Management (IHM). Her main areas of interest are UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention and Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention. She has worked with different international organisations including ICCROM and ICOMOS International. At present she is also the Managing Director of Think Heritage! which is a cultural heritage think tank based in Bahrain, and advisor to the Minister of Culture.

Takuya Soma (相馬 拓也) was born in Tokyo, Japan. He took his M.A. in Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London) in 2004. He graduated (without a doctoral degree) from the Ph.D. course in Archaeology at the Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Science, Waseda University, Japan, in 2011. Since 2013 he has been an Associate Researcher (with WATERCOPE, a Sino-Mongolian-German research and development project) in animal husbandry in the tropics and sub-tropics in the Department of Organic Agricultural Science at the University of Kassel, Germany. Research interests: human geography, ecological anthropology, ethno-ornithology, and Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) especially among the nomadic animal herders of Mongolia and central Asia.

Battulga Sukhee (Сүхээ Баттулга) was was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Aichi Prefectural University, Japan, in 2005. He was a co-ordinator in the Mongolian pavilion at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi. Since 2009 he has been Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures at the National University of Mongolia. His research interests include the anthropological study of ethnicity and migrants, and area studies of Japan, especially the revitalisation of Islam, and the minority Kazakh community in western Mongolia.

Shadia Taha obtained a B.A.(Hons) in Archaeology from the University of Khartoum (Sudan), and an M. Phil. and a Ph.D. – both from the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. Taha’s doctoral thesis investigates attachment to abandoned heritage using ethnographic research methods. It was published by Archaeopress, Oxford, UK in February 2013. Her research interests include ethnography, oral traditions, intangible cultural heritage and communities. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, a Research Assistant with Dr Marie Louise Sørensen, a College Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and an affiliated Fellow at the African Centre, University of Cambridge.

Leo Yuan gained his Ph.D. in Art Administration and Management in the Department of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Fashion Imaging, Mingdao University, Taiwan, and a supervisor of the Taiwan Art Administration and Management Society. His doctoral thesis was An inductive proposal for a system for the revitalisation of an intangible cultural heritage: the puppet theatre of Taiwan. His main research interests are cultural and creative industries, revitalisation of intangible cultural heritage, and creative thinking.